


Blood Hunger

by Overlithe



Series: Overlithe's avatar_500 ficlets [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Community: fanfic100, Dark, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-14
Updated: 2010-10-14
Packaged: 2017-10-12 15:54:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/126575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Overlithe/pseuds/Overlithe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a dark night, close to a Fire Nation town, Hama remembers. Takes place after Hama escapes from the prison for waterbenders, but some time before the main events of <em>The Puppetmaster</em>. Written for prompt 13 (memory) of the avatar_500 LJ comm and prompt 74 (dark) of the fanfic100 LJ comm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood Hunger

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to **btsxbeta** for her input on the story.

**Warnings:** There's nothing above a T rating, but the cocktail of disturbing implications from Hama's episode is a tad less subtle here.

  


Blood Hunger

  


 

On foggy nights, mist cloaked the moon and the town's lights, and when the press of the walls got too great, Hama had to guide herself by the tides in her blood. She laid a hand on a tree trunk sticky with damp and looked at the forest and the huddle of houses slumbering in the fog.

 _This is the worst thing that can happen to one of your people, isn't it?_ The memory burrowed through her flesh, the voice soft as the mist pooling in the woods, sharp as the brambles and thorns ready to claw and scratch. _Being trapped like this. Behind bars_.

Her hands balled into fists until her nails dug little blood crescents on her palms, and she started walking again, repeating the same words under her breath, over and over in a voice like a thread of water. _Do not send me from the land of my ancestors… from the cold shores of whale-sung seas… from the darkening white plains and the spirit lights… Take me back. Take me back._

Take me…

She halted and the breeze shook a peal of laughter off her throat, scattering it in the dark like glass shards. Her captor had been wrong about the bars, the cramped cage where you could never stand up and where the air was dry enough to hurt your throat. There were worse things, things that wouldn't kill you but which would stalk you as you stared at a crack in a wall, at the ceiling in an endless grey night. Things that would creep closer and closer like a pack of polar leopards hunting a seal, blood-hungry.

She resumed her walk, her heart drumming a strange rhythm against her ribcage, a froth of breath on her lips. For a moment there was only the strangling heat of this dreadful place, the smell of leaves starting to rot, the stares that clung to her blue eyes for a second longer than politeness allowed, the laughter of children as they burned little wooden figures daubed with green and blue.

So many, so many deserving of retribution.

The woods whispered. The town muttered in its mist-thin doze and its noises wafted towards her: shutters being drawn, voices, the mournful baas of wooly-pigs.

Sooner or later, the walls would become too tight, the press of hungry memories too great. Then she'd wander even when the moon wasn't a perfect silver-white circle in the sky, a watchful, pupilless eye. Then she'd start thinking about going some place else again, anywhere, as if trying to keep one step ahead of the pack. Only you never could.

Sooner or later, someone would walk her way.

Her blood rose and the sap in the plants around her rose with it. She slunk into where the shadows were thickest and coolest.

And waited.

 

***The End***

**Notes:** The opening line and "so many, so many deserving of retribution" were inspired, respectively, by Richard Matheson's _I Am Legend_ and Alan Moore  & David Gibbons' _Watchmen_.


End file.
